> Other editor users simply have no concept of how easy it is to whip up some quick script to perform some task in emacs.
I don't want to start a flamewar, but I moved most things I was doing in Emacs to Textadept a while back because I found Textadept more convenient. That's not to say TA does everything you can do in Emacs, but it replaced all of the scripting I was doing with Emacs.
You have the full power of Lua inside TA. Emacs always has a lag when I start it up, whereas TA is instant. I slowly built up functionality inside TA to the point that I realized I could replace everything I was doing in Emacs.
It's so small and lightweight that, just for fun, I wrote a "web browser" inside TA. It calls out to lynx and loads a readable text version of the page. I use a keyboard shortcut to open links. I have functions for searching the web, I can search YouTube and open the videos in VLC, and so on. This was a practical thing to do: I can use TA as a browser on really old laptops.
It maybe isn't for everyone, but in Emacs when I was doing this[1] to duplicate a line:
C-a C-SPACE C-n M-w C-y
I asked why I wasn't using a better text editor. In TA, it's C-d. Just as Emacs is an interface for Emacs Lisp, TA is an interface for Lua, and with a lot less overhead.
Of course I meant editors which I know and tried like vscode. I don't know Textadept, so it may be easy to write quick scripts in it.
As for your C-d example, it's a trivial function in emacs which I too wrote many years ago and bound to C-d, so it's not a compelling example, because it can be added trivially in emacs too.
Agree with everything except "trivially". Emacs is a house of cards. Pretty much every shortcut is already taken, so then you have to figure out what's already bound to C-d, and how your change is going to interact with everything else you do. For one binding it doesn't matter, but doing that kind of customization over and over gets annoying, causes the init file to balloon, and slows the startup time.
I don't want to start a flamewar, but I moved most things I was doing in Emacs to Textadept a while back because I found Textadept more convenient. That's not to say TA does everything you can do in Emacs, but it replaced all of the scripting I was doing with Emacs.
You have the full power of Lua inside TA. Emacs always has a lag when I start it up, whereas TA is instant. I slowly built up functionality inside TA to the point that I realized I could replace everything I was doing in Emacs.
It's so small and lightweight that, just for fun, I wrote a "web browser" inside TA. It calls out to lynx and loads a readable text version of the page. I use a keyboard shortcut to open links. I have functions for searching the web, I can search YouTube and open the videos in VLC, and so on. This was a practical thing to do: I can use TA as a browser on really old laptops.
It maybe isn't for everyone, but in Emacs when I was doing this[1] to duplicate a line:
C-a C-SPACE C-n M-w C-y
I asked why I wasn't using a better text editor. In TA, it's C-d. Just as Emacs is an interface for Emacs Lisp, TA is an interface for Lua, and with a lot less overhead.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/88399/how-do-i-duplicate...